Canadians will continue to lose a minimum of
$7.8 billion a year if Prime Minister Harper and other members of the G8 fail
to agree on a plan to tackle global tax havens.
That’s the message Canadians for Tax Fairness executive director Dennis
Howlett will give to Monday's Finance Committee hearings on Bill S-17 related to implementation of tax conventions.
“In the six days the Prime Minister has been out
of the country, the federal government lost nearly $13 million in revenue –
just from not having a system in place. How is that good fiscal management?”
Howlett says.
Last
week, when he arrived in London, Harper indicated support for a system to track
if, and where, multinational corporations pay taxes on profits.
“Good
start,” says Howlett. “But for a plan to work it has to be comprehensive.
Nearly all of us pay our taxes and our government owes it to us to make sure
that the super-wealthy and multi-nationals are doing the same thing. There are
several other key measures that need to be agreed upon coming out of the G8.”
Bill
S-17 deals with bilateral tax treaties with a number of countries, including
several that are recognized as tax havens.
They are almost useless for exposing tax cheats using tax havens without
a global system for automatic tax information exchange.
Tax
haven use in Canada is at an all-time high with $170 billion – ten percent of
the GDP – socked offshore.